ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes instances or situations where new publics come to the fore, where what counts as justice is being established, and where new political subjects emerge in a variety of cases from urban and rural, northern and southern China, and across many different social contexts. It focuses in particular, on the place of legal discourses and action, or of the new 'rule of law', in social imaginations and in popular struggles for justice in China. The chapter explores the interplay between private and public spaces, between morality and law, and between 'front stage' and 'back stage', to explore how the common quest for justice, which takes on state slogans but cannot be absorbed by state institutions, changes Chinese society from the bottom up by creating self-organized, and self-animated, new publics. Top-down attempts at ethical refashioning of the subject for politics in China have always involved actively establishing new parameters for public judgements.
